Most of your
agency fee
never touches
the work.
Duck The System is a network of senior creatives who already make the campaigns for brands you have heard of. You brief them directly. AI takes out the grind, not the thinking. Everything struck out on this invoice is what you stop paying for.
Ten years inside agencies. Two industry awards. Three million app downloads driven on one campaign. The receipts are directly below — only the client names are covered.
The retainer
you already paid
| Ref | Line item | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 001 | Account director In the pitch. Never seen again. | Void |
| 002 | Strategy deck, 42 slides Three of them were read. | Void |
| 003 | Weekly status call ×52 An email would have done it. | Void |
| 004 | Junior team, billed senior Learning on your budget. | Void |
| 005 | The office with the neon sign You have never been inside it. | Void |
| 006 | New business team Currently pitching your competitor. | Void |
| 007 | The actual work The only line you ever wanted. | Kept |
- Balance carried forward
- Line 007. That’s it.
Six overhead line items are struck through and marked void. Only line 007, the actual work, is kept.
Why the names are blacked out
Sheet 03 / ConfidentialBecause the people who would make your work still have day jobs making everyone else’s.
Every senior creative worth hiring is already employed. The good ones are inside the brands and agencies whose work you admire, on contracts that do not let them put your logo in a portfolio — or their own name on a website like this one.
So there are two things you can have. You can have their logos on a homepage, or you can have the people. Almost every agency chooses the logos, then staffs your account with whoever is free.
We made the other choice. Names withheld, numbers not. Everything on this site is checkable the moment you are in a room with us and an NDA, which takes about a day.
Roles this network staffs. Which of them your job needs is decided at scope, and you meet every one of them before anything is signed.
What you are actually buying
Sheet 04 / Schedule A| Ref | Line item | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| 101 | Strategy & positioning The insight the campaign hangs on. Written in a page, not forty-two slides. | Fixed scope |
| 102 | Creative & campaign The idea, the lines, the assets. Made by the people who made the ones you have seen. | Fixed scope |
| 103 | Film & content production Brand films, social, topicals, memes. Broadcast standard down to nine-second standard. | Fixed scope |
| 104 | Performance media Sequential and personalised buying against the purchase journey, not against a vanity dashboard. | Fixed scope |
| 105 | Creator & influencer A live network, negotiated directly. No middle layer taking a cut of a cut. | Fixed scope |
| 106 | AI marketing systems The workflows and agents that make your team faster. Built into your stack, handed over, documented. | You keep it |
- Not on this invoice
- Retainers you cannot leave.
Line 106 is the one no agency will sell you, because a client who owns the system stops needing the agency. Full scope of each line →
How a job runs
Sheet 05 / Routing slipBrief received
One call. You talk, we ask hard questions, nobody performs a pitch theatre with a showreel.
No chargeScope stamped
Every deliverable written as a line item with a price against it. You approve the sheet or you walk.
Before money movesIn production
Senior people on the thinking. AI on the grinding — versioning, cutdowns, localisation, reporting.
You see it weeklyHanded over
Work delivered, files transferred, systems documented. Every asset and every workflow is yours.
Yours to keep← no onboarding fee, no lock-in, no minimum term
The job files
Sheet 06 / 3 of 5 released
National crypto adoption campaign, finance
We turned a financial product into a status symbol by asking India one question in its own slang.
- App downloads
- 3,000,000+
- Impressions
- 11,665,500
- Mentions earned
- 74,000
Open the file →
Purpose campaign at altitude, beverages
A water brand that owed everything to a melting mountain range, made to actually pay it back.
- Earned media reach
- ₹12 crore
- Press articles
- 200+
- Households served
- 150+
Open the file →
Sale-event recall campaign, e-commerce
A life-size box in a mall in Gurugram, wired to a retargeting stack, hosted by a film star.
- Categories promoted
- 4
- Media layers
- 3
- Channels
- Offline + digital
Open the file →
The objections, answered straight
Sheet 07 / QueriesYou should not, on the strength of a website. So the first call is free, on video, faces on, under an NDA if you want one. You meet the actual people who would do your job, you see the unredacted work, and then you decide. Nothing is signed before that. The anonymity is for the public internet and their current employers — it is not for you.
The opposite, and the numbers on this page are the argument. Those campaigns were made by people, and they won awards judged by people. AI is used where it belongs: versioning, cutdowns, localisation, resizing, reporting, first-pass research — the grinding that used to eat a junior team’s week and your budget with it.
Strategy, the idea and the final cut are human. If a machine could have written “Bitcoin liya kya?”, someone would have.
It is priced per job, not per month, and you get the number in writing before anything starts. There is no published rate card because a number invented for a website is a number you would have to renegotiate on the first call, and that is exactly the game this whole site is against.
Build a scope and you get a real statement of work with a real price against it.
You do. Full transfer on final payment — assets, working files, and any AI workflow or automation built during the engagement, documented well enough for your own team to run it without us. That last part is deliberate. An agency that has made itself unnecessary has done the job.
One named lead runs your job end to end and is the only person you ever have to chase. The network supplies the specialists; the accountability does not move around. It is the same structure every agency runs internally, minus the floors of people it charges you to keep in a building.
Usually in the gap they both complain about: the volume of output nobody has capacity for, the category work your agency has no experience in, or the AI systems your team keeps being told to “look into”. We take a defined scope, plug into your existing process and hand it back. No land grab.
Write the invoice you actually wanted.
Tick what you need. Six questions, about ninety seconds. You get a real statement of work back — scope, sequence, and a realistic number of working days — and we get enough to price it properly before we ever speak.
Not ready to talk? Audit your current retainer first. Free, sixty seconds, no email, and it works out how much of what you already pay is reaching the work.